The Plant Heritage Missing Collector Garden

If you’re visiting the Royal Horticultural Society Chelsea Flower Show (or watching the television coverage) this week, look out for our local, Surrey-based charity, Plant Heritage who will be unveiling their first ever Chelsea Garden when this prestigious and world-renowned Flower Show opens to the public on 19th May 2026, writes Beth Otway.

The Planting Design Collective team – Sally-Anne Rees, Kate Campbell, and William Murray.

The Plant Heritage Missing Collector Garden is in the All About Plants area, it was designed by garden designers, Sally-Anne Rees, Kate Campbell, and William Murray from The Planting Design Collective, who hope their design will highlight the important work Plant Heritage National Collectors do to protect our garden plants. Plant Heritage is the only charity that focuses on conserving garden plants.

VantagePoint’s garden writer, Beth Otway met garden designer, Will Murray before the Chelsea build started to find out all about The Plant Heritage Missing Collector Garden.  Will explained, “In the process of designing the Missing Collector Garden for Plant Heritage, we’ve realised that the National Plant Collections are the most amazing resource for garden designers and for everyone for anyone who’s interested in gardens.  The National Collection Holders safeguard this amazing, accumulated knowledge on how to grow plants and Plant Heritage’s work is vital as they officiate and support the National Collection holders.”

Beth asked Will if there were any plants that he had got to know better through his work for Plant Heritage that he’ll now consider including in his future gardens?  Will replies, “One of the plants which is quite interesting, which I hadn’t ever really considered putting in a garden, was the Aspidistra.  It’s kind of that real marmite plant.  Sally said Aspidistras would be brilliant for it and I was a little bit sceptical, but Philip Oostenbrink at Warmer Castle, holds the National Collection for Aspidistras, and actually his passion for these plants changed my opinion on them.  I think they had this reputation as being these old-fashioned houseplants at some point and Philip has come in and sort of opened my eyes to the interesting ones.

We’ve also worked really closely with the two National Collection holders for Geums.  Iloved Geums anyway, I love really bright oranges and bright colours, but I’ve grown even more attached to them.”

‘The Bees Knees’ (Daniel Myhill – National Collection Holder)

The Plant Heritage Missing Collector Garden is a woodland edge garden that’s filled with plants, including Geum, Boehmeria, Polypodium, and Thalictrum. These plants are all protected for the future, as they’re currently nurtured and propagated by National Collection holders in Plant Heritage’s living library of National Plant Collections®.  Visitors can also admire plants in the Missing Collector Garden that are without a National Collection holder and are currently at risk. These plant groups, which include Aquilegia, Carex, Deschampsia, Lysimachia, and Verbascum, all currently need a National Collection holder – someone to be their ambassador and protector. Could you be one of the missing collectors that Plant Heritage hope to find?

Plant Heritage aim to encourage more people to get involved in plant conservation by inspiring Chelsea Flower Show visitors to become National Collection holders or Plant Guardians, or to support Plant Heritage’s work by becoming a Plant Heritage member. There are many ways we can support Plant Heritage’s work in plant conservation, including volunteering for the charity, or making a donation.

When the Chelsea Flower Show ends on the 23rd May, the Plant Heritage Missing Collector Garden will be packed up and transported to Chester Zoo, where it will be unpacked, re-imagined, and re-planted.  At Chester Zoo the garden is in a bigger and slightly different format, there’ll be a much wider path to enable the public to walk through the garden. All the component pieces from Chelsea will be there, but this time in a changed format.  The garden at the zoo will be bigger, as the space at Chelsea is actually quite small, measuring just 6m by 8m. For Chelsea, the Plant Heritage Garden is designed as if it’s one person’s garden, but at the zoo the Plant Heritage Garden will be transformed into a public space when it will be unravelled out and unwound a lot more.

The planting density used at Chelsea Flower Show is super, super-high with something like 25 plants per square metre, whereas in a normal garden, you might have seven plants (or less) in an equivalent sized area.  To make the garden look really full at Chelsea, many more plants are needed.  This would be a terrible way of planting a garden in real life, but it works for the theatrical nature of Chelsea.

The bronze chair sculpture is by the artists known as ‘Full Grown’ who are Alice and Gavin Munroe, and the chair has been provided by The Sarah Myerscough Gallery.

Many National Collection holders have donated or leant Plant Heritage plants from their collections to use in The Plant Heritage Missing Collector Garden at Chelsea Flower Show.  The majority of the plants seen in the Plant Heritage Missing Collector Garden have been grown or nurtured by Simon Sutcliff at How Green Nursery.

For gardening advice for May, visit Beth Otway’s website, pumpkinbeth.com, where you’ll discover an abundance of helpful advice on growing edible and decorative garden plants and houseplants.

Links:

Plant Heritage: plantheritage.org.uk/

The Surrey Plant Heritage Group is a vibrant and genuinely friendly group that supports Plant Heritage’s plant conservation work with an active programme of talks in Cobham, Surrey.  The Plant Heritage Surrey Group also hold propagation workshops, they organise trips to gardens and nurseries, they hold two local plant fairs, as well as stalls at local fairs and fetes.  Find out about Plant Heritage’s Surrey meetings: plantheritage.org.uk/groups/surrey/

Join up and become a Plant Heritage member online: plantheritage.org.uk/get-involved/join-us/

Top image: The Planting Design Collective’s design for the Plant Heritage Missing Collector Garden for Chelsea Flower Show 2026.